A01=Akhil Gupta
A01=Purnima Mankekar
Affective Labor
Aspirational Infrastructures
Author_Akhil Gupta
Author_Purnima Mankekar
Bengaluru
Biomediated Bodies
BPO agents
Business Process Outsourcing
Call Centers
Category=JBSL1
Category=JHBA
Category=JHMC
Commodity Affect
emplacement
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Futurity
Inequality of Languages
Information Technology
Informational Capitalism
Potentiality
Racial Capitalism
Simultaneity
Virtual Travel
Product details
- ISBN 9781478031536
- Weight: 476g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 30 Apr 2025
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In The Future of Futurity, Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta examine the lives and experiences of call center agents in India’s business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, who live in Bengaluru and work for customers in the Global North. Mankekar and Gupta show how futurity—an affective-temporal potentiality and mode of being that emphasizes the unfolding of time—enables BPO workers to strive for hopeful futures despite their experiences of growing inequality, volatility, and violence. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with managers, owners, and workers of BPO companies, the authors explore how workers find pathways for navigating a globalized world and for imagining their futures in it. They point to the heterogeneous lives, yearnings, and anxieties of BPO workers, foregrounding the disjunctions and conjunctions between labor, corporeality, intimacy, family life, and mobility. Mankekar and Gupta show how workers’ daily lives and imaginings of the future point to the relationships between futurity, capital, and technology as well as futurity’s imbrications with contemporary racial capitalism. In so doing, the authors insist on the transformative potential of futurity even in conditions of extreme precarity.
Purnima Mankekar is Professor in the Departments of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, Gender Studies, and Film, TV, and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Akhil Gupta is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Akhil Gupta is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
